Dip into the past

Tag / railways

Some stories are so good, they get retold over and over again. The only problem with some of these stories is that they aren’t true. In this particular case, the story is how the suburb of Queen’s Park got its name. And it involves a murder.

According to Landgate, and repeated by that source-of-all-truth Wikipedia, Queen’s Park was originally called Woodlupine and changed its name after a brutal crime which happened in the suburb in 1911 and became widely known as the Woolupine Murder. After all, who wants to live in a suburb with that association?

We won’t go into the details of the horrific rape-murder here, except to note there are question marks over whether the offender was mentally fit to stand trial, let alone be executed. But executed he was and there’s not a lot we can do about that now.

Now there is some truth to the story, but it doesn’t involve the local residents trying to get rid of a name to which they were very much attached.

Woodlupine wasn’t even originally called that. Until 1898 it was known as Jubilee Estate, until the Railway Department changed the name of the station. The new name was after an old orange plantation in the area which had been called Wood-Lupin. There were some protests, but the station name was changed anyway.

The good citizens of Woodlupine felt that everyone hated them. They were victimised by the Railway Department, by the Post Office and, most of all, by their local government, Queen’s Park, which had been founded in 1907. The new local government rose out of the ashes of the short-lived, and completely disastrous, Canning Roads Board which, you will not be surprised to hear, was loathed by everyone in Woodlupine.

So, when one of the first actions of Queen’s Park was to propose changing the name of Woodlupine Station and the Post Office to Queen’s Park, there was outrage. After all, the new council wanted everything named after itself, and Woodlupine was the busiest Post Office and Station, so it had to go.

Naturally, petitions and complaints followed, and the council chickened out and didn’t follow through on its plan. That is, until the Woodlupine Murder in 1911. Seizing their chance, the following year the councillors wrote to the Railway Department asking for the station’s name to be changed. This was agreed, provided Queen’s Park pay the £10 cost of having all the signage changed.

Perhaps the Woodlupine residents were worn down by years of council ‘oppression’. Perhaps the murder was on their minds. In any case, little opposition seems to have been raised and the council finally got their way.

The real story here (if we put aside the murder victim and her family) is about a local government needing to have its ‘brand’ on a Post Office and Railway Station and opportunistically seizing the moment. Is it more interesting than a tale of residents so disgusted by a crime they wanted to change the name of their suburb? That’s for the reader to decide.

The PTA suggests closing ‘underperforming’ stations on the Midland Line, and Dodgy Perth is very cranky. We’ll start with a declaration of interest: Meltham is our local station, and we hate the long trek from Maylands, especially when it’s raining. Or hot. Or any form of weather at all.

Dear PTA, your predecessors first promised us a railway station at Meltham in 1898, and the Meltham Estate was only built and sold with that pledge in mind. There wouldn’t have been development if people thought they’d have to walk to Bayswater or Maylands. But they did have to. A generation later, in 1923, the Commissioner of Railways turned down Bayswater Council’s repeated pleas for station at Meltham.

Another ten years went by and the council was getting desperate. The government suggested the council should subsidise a new station, so Bayswater guaranteed to cover losses up to £50 a year. At the moment, they said, “people were compelled to walk great distances…, and it was felt that the lack of any reasonably close travelling facilities was retarding the development of the district”.

Even so, the Minister for Railways said no. This made the council quite cross, so they resolved to keep demanding a station until the government gave in. And they engaged engineers to design reasonable solutions. Didn’t make the government budge one inch.

By 1937, the council was offering even more money and a private developer offered to chip in as well. The local MLC said, very reasonably, “if the Government wanted people to use trains in the metropolitan area it must provide facilities”. Nope, said the Minister for Railways, who was in favour of more roads!

We’ll skip over the war years, but in 1947, half a century after first proposed, it was announced Meltham would get its station. Work began in April and then immediately stopped due to a shortage of labour and materials. In fact, it was so delayed that when opened on 14 May 1948, only a tiny part of the platform had been constructed and it was essential to be in the last two coaches if you wanted to alight.

It might have surprised the Minister for Railways, but it came as no shock to anyone else that the station was an immediate success, even if only part of the platform was open. Fifty years of pleading, offers to subsidise, and proof that a station was essential had finally paid off.

Henry Whittall Venn was a pompous, portly windbag with a huge moustache. After being sacked by Forrest, he passed his final years at Dardanup where he died of heart disease on 8 March 1908.

End of refresher.

Venn is remembered for two things: trebling the mileage of the government railways, and having been an aging lothario.

Guess which one Dodgy Perth is going to celebrate?

At some point, probably early 1901, Venn was at a party when he met a young, but married, actress. We don’t know her name, which is a pity, so I’m going to call her Eve. She needs to be called something.

Since he was 56 summers old, you would think that Venn would know better than to act like a giddy teenager and believe in love at first sight. But that’s precisely what he did.

However, it had been a long, long time since he had been courting young ladies—in fact, he had been married for nearly three decades.